Nothing Can Happen More Beautiful
by Solstice Zero
Summary: During an investigation, an alien with the ability of mind control forces Gwen to attempt to kill herself. Torchwood stops her; Ianto is left to gather the pieces for both of them. Major discussion of suicide.


**Warning:** This is a trigger warning; this story contains major discussion and description of self-harm and suicide. It was written for the Hurt/Comfort Bingo challenge at hc_bingo on LiveJournal.

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**Nothing Can Happen More Beautiful**

_And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death._  
-Walt Whitman

Her blood was on everything.

Ianto breathed through his mouth and let his eyes travel along the splashes and trails running down into the basin of Gwen's sink. Crisscrossed streams of red, miniature rivulets, traveling down from the lakes on the porcelain counter and collecting together in the drain, almost conscientiously. Blood doesn't stain porcelain. He'd left it for last. He'd thrown out the bath mat and the towels. He'd ripped down the shower curtain and broken five of the plastic circles that held it to the rod. And now he was armed with a wet flannel (cold water) and rolled sleeves and the only thing that he could do was stand there and watch the roll of invisible veins down the side of the sink basin. O negative.

He could hear murmuring from the sitting room. Soft crying. But over all of it was the buzz in his ears, the low-level panic that crouched behind his eyes, had done since he'd entered the bathroom after Jack had kicked down the door and found her there with the razorblade and the vacant look into the mirror at her own eyes. The lazy slashslashslash, all the wrong way, thank god the wrong way, thank god just one arm.

There is a wrong way to kill yourself.

If they had been any slower, if Tosh had been less brilliant, if the roads had been crowded, Gwen would be dead. His mind kept reminding him of that. His hand kept telling him to press the wet flannel into one of the red pools reflecting the vanity lights, but his mind kept telling him what it would have been like to follow Jack into Gwen's bathroom and find her slumped against the bath, pale and cold and mutilated. Over and over. The cold collected fear at the bottom of his stomach shivered.

He pressed the flannel into the blood at watched it dilute, watched it soak up into the white, turning it pink, dark pink. He ran the cold water. He rinsed the cloth. He pressed it into another puddle of his friend's blood.

This was not a new sensation, his hand against cold flannel against blood against porcelain. Working for Torchwood meant cleanup, meant blood, meant an inventory of methods for stain removal stored away in one of the many rooms in his head. He rinsed the flannel again. He swiped it against the sides of the basin and destroyed the spidersilk webbing of the rivulets.

She'd turned, with distant eyes and bloody fingertips and white socks stained with little drops of red, to look at them standing in the doorway, Jack and Ianto and Tosh and Owen, she'd turned and looked at all of their panicked faces and said quietly, "It's all right."

And the worst part was how convincing it was.

Then Tosh pointed something alien and complicated and flipped a switch and Gwen stumbled back against the wall, and she looked down at her arm, and she started screaming with pain and fear. Jack ran in and pulled her against him and hurried her out of the room, with Owen half a step behind them and Tosh next to him. Which left Ianto in the doorway of the bloodstained bathroom, with the slow, panic-fogged realization that he had to clean it up. Before Rhys came home. Before Gwen came back in. Like it never happened.

So he did it.

When he was finished, when it was spotless and empty and white, Ianto went to stand in the shadows at the end of the hall and look into the sitting room. Gwen sat on the settee, Owen kneeling in front of her, holding her arm and a curved suture needle, drawing it back and tucking in forward in the last few stitches. His face was concentrated and struggling against fear and relief.

Tosh stood awkwardly off to the side, near the door, the blue light of a Torchwood PDA soft against her face; she was deeply involved in whatever she was doing. Finding the thing that did this. Finding it so Jack could kill it twice. Jack stood behind Gwen with a hand on her shoulder, as silent as everyone else, as still and as tense but four times as guilty. Five times.

Six.

Gwen sniffed and tried to cry quietly. There was blood on Jack's coat.

Owen pulled the last stitch and cut the thread, and Tosh's PDA beeped. She looked up to meet Jack's eyes and nodded. _Found it_, Ianto watched her think, watched the message travel across the room to Jack, where it landed in his eyes, working with the kind of false telepathy granted by familiarity. Working when their voices couldn't.

Ianto saw Jack nod and think, _Let's go_, and Owen stood up when it filtered through the top of his head.

They moved for the door. Tosh, Owen, Jack.

With his hand on the doorknob, Jack turned back and met Ianto's eyes, and Ianto felt Jack's thought slide in through his forehead, that little tingle.

_Fix her._

Then the door closed and they were all gone.

Ianto didn't think Jack could feel Ianto's silent response from the stairs. _How?_

Gwen sat completely still on the couch, staring down at her arms lying wrists-up, stitches-up on her thighs. Ianto could see the smears of blood still there, still everywhere, on her clothes, the soft white button-up, the dark blue jeans trying to hide it. Ianto lingered in the doorway for another near-silent minute, crying minute, then went to the kitchen and found another clean flannel. (It was blue, dark blue like Gwen's lying jeans.) He ran it under the tap – it had to be cold water. Always cold water for blood.

He went back to the sitting room and pulled closer the coffee table that Owen had pushed out of his way. Ianto sat on it. He stared down at Gwen's arms. He reached out and held her wrist with one hand, and let the flannel wipe away a smear of blood from between two ragged lines of stitches. He looked up from his work into her face.

She was watching him, watching his face, tears dragging themselves down her cheeks, mascara raccooned and dark. He should have done that first, he thought. He should have wiped the mascara first.

Gwen didn't throw thoughts at him. Gwen had the words.

"What if Rhys had found me?"

Ianto was silent. He wiped another patch of dried blood. Beneath, the pale, smooth skin of her forearm gleamed moist and clean. Ianto was a painter in reverse.

"What could I have told him?"

Gwen wouldn't have been able to tell him anything. Gwen would have kept cutting herself and looking at her eyes in the mirror, because that was what the alien controlling her mind wanted her to do. Rhys would have stood shouting in her face and cutting his fingers to mix his blood with hers while he tried to get the razorblade away, but Gwen wouldn't even have acknowledged his presence until she'd lost enough blood that she would never acknowledge anyone's presence ever again.

Ianto let himself imagine what the retcon would feel like in his hand when he passed it over to a traumatized Rhys Williams and made him forget every minute he had ever spent with his beautiful fiancee.

"What am I going to say about the stitches?"

There was so much saltwater under her words. She was ocean on the inside, leaking from the eyes, drowning, throwing and grasping at life preservers of meaningless words. Ianto imagined the water starting to leak from her stitches, starting to do his work for him, tracking clean channels through the bloody patches on her arm. The cuts creating, the cuts taking away.

He wiped another patch away. More gleaming paleness.

"Ianto."

His quivering name, like it was cold. Cold water against her hot, broken skin. He imagined cleaning her dead body in the autopsy bay. It would be his job. It would be the reverse, then; hot water, cold skin. The tin sound of shower spray against the metal autopsy table. The pink, diluted blood coursing down to the drain at her feet. Her eyes closed and her face peaceful and her hair tangled. Pale, cold stomach; pale, cold breasts; the parts of her that he had never seen, displayed because modesty was not a common trait among the deceased.

Three minutes later. Two minutes later. The sound of a skull cracking against a porcelain sink.

"Ianto, please."

He was wiping clean skin.

"Please." Crying hard. Shuddering words. "Ianto, please say something."

All white.

Hysterical: "Ianto, _please!_"

His hand tightened on her wrist, his eyes lifted to her face, his expression was pained and terrified but _present_ and he reached out to pull her against him and tuck his face into the hollow of her neck and shoulder. She gripped him hard around his torso and held on as though he would try to buck her off. She sobbed into his chest. His eyes leaked into her hair. His forehead was against her pulsepoint.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

_Alive._

He broke out of the cage in his head with her fingers digging into the skin beneath his shirt. She was_ there_, the whole of her, all sewn together and warm and constant and shaking, and he couldn't believe it. He had been so prepared-unprepared to find her, floating somewhere up behind himself as they'd slammed the doors to the SUV and come running to her flat. Prepared: knowing what he would need to do if she was dead, a list that had been made his on his first day at Torchwood Three and stuck to his mind's refrigerator door. Unprepared: she couldn't possibly be dead. It couldn't happen, not to Gwen, because everyone died, but not people Ianto loved, not like that.

"I'm sorry," Gwen was sobbing, muffled by fabric and buttons. "I'm so sorry."

It wasn't her fault. It really wasn't.

"Defensive wounds," he said into her throat.

She had her forehead against his heart. She kept her hands on either side of his chest when she pulled back. "What?"

He sat up, pulling his hands back to wipe at his eyes. "Defensive wounds," he repeated. He held up his arms in front of his face in an _X_, wrists out. "You got them in a bar fight gone bad." There was wet laughter in his words.

"It's the other way, usually," Gwen said, reaching out to turn Ianto's wrists toward his body. "The wounds are on the outside."

Ianto lowered his arms. "Does Rhys know that?"

She watched him. She shook her head.

Ianto nodded. "It'll work."

"What'll I do about the scars?"

"There's a machine," Ianto said. He took Gwen's other arm and wiped the little smears of rubbed-off blood quickly away. "In the Hub. It gets rid of scars. I'll get Owen to use it for you." _I have the answers. I have the machines. I can help you. I can do something. You aren't dead. I can't believe you aren't dead._

He looked at her face. There was a smear of blood on her jaw. He held her chin very gently and rubbed it away.

She reached out and pressed a kiss against his forehead, then held there, her hands on either side of his head, her fingers still quivering, her eyes closed.

"You aren't dead," Ianto told the floor. Wonder. Relief. Fear. All there in three words.

Gwen made a sound that caught in her throat, somewhere between a sob and a hysterical laugh, and that summed everything up.

They sat in silence in the middle of Gwen's flat, nothing but breathing and the tremble of fingers, and _life._


End file.
